Like James Lee Burke"s other Dave Robichaux novels, Jolie Blon"s Bounce has at its core a sense of people as driven by demons; both their own demons--Robichaux"s controlled alcoholism and the dark rages that lie behind it--and the demons handed down to them by history. Robichaux knows that gifted young black musician Tee Bobby Hulin was present at the rape and murder of a young white woman--he is also certain that Hulin was neither rapist nor murderer. Equally, though he has no grounds for certainty about it, he has a sense that the killing of the sister of a local mobster has nothing to do with the case and that the interest of an eccentric young bible salesman in the tough woman DA Shanahan and the woman private eye Zerelda is not harmless at all. Robichaux wants to play cases by the book--this gets harder when he is brutalised by a mad old racist and when his friends find themselves in jeopardy. James Lee Burke has always been intelligent about the edge of things, and here he is taking his hero to the edge of police procedure and the edge of the real--some of this case skirts battles with principalities and powers. This is one of the nerviest and darkest of this extraordinary series and one of the most poetic--an odd word to use of a thriller, yet the right one. --Roz Kaveney